


past and present

by incoffeespoons



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Introspection, M/M, also coffee
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-24
Updated: 2012-07-24
Packaged: 2017-11-10 15:44:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/467957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incoffeespoons/pseuds/incoffeespoons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Bruce feels at home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	past and present

The biggest difference, Bruce thought, was the coffee.

There were intricacies when you visited someone's residence, rules and conventions passed down, parcelled up with fear - fear that you'd be called a bad host or a rude guest. There were shoes left at doorsteps, the soft compliments that eased the transition into more comfortable conversation; there were feet kept off the furniture and words like 'please' and 'thank you'. There was coffee, too, but only if offered. 

For a while, Bruce clung to these conventions, simply because they made him feel like less of an imposition. He was polite and bit his tongue even when Tony was deliberately winding him up, because he had a massive glass tower in which he was allowed free reign, and shelter, and conversations. By the time he had been cajoled into agreeing to have a room at the Stark headquarters - he wasn't moving in, no, that wasn't what it was, it was essentially just to stop him passing out on the lab stools and waking up with the posture of a man twice his age, that was it; it was a hotel room, essentially - many of his rules drifted away, detached like balloons. There was no point tidying up after his experiments at the end of the day, because he knew he would return to them the next day, and Tony always berated him for taking ages to set everything up again. 

So he simply stopped. He allowed his possessions to filter out from the sports bag placed next to his new bed. He had things delivered to Tony's address. He erased the memory of his previous niceties because something about them felt so unnecessary, so...dissonant, he figured, not ever a part of him. To deliberately exercise extreme politeness with someone was to place them at a careful distance, to hold them at arm's length. They could see you well enough, but they were not close enough to see the smudges on your character that were visible when examined more carefully. And perhaps part of this - the deictic this, all nebulous and ill-defined - was a daring game. To make someone look at your negative aspects; to challenge that person to embrace them or else discard you. 

Coffee, though. Bruce knew how to hurry up the small, whirring machine that produced it, the one balanced on the reflective countertops of the kitchen near his room. Once, when he couldn't sleep, he took it apart, spilled its guts over the cold floor, and tried to put it back together again, but there was a bit of the plastic panelling missing. When Tony swanned in the next day, he found it, half underneath the fridge. 

"You can just press the button, you know," he had said. "Tearing things apart is a pretty risky method of making them work."

Bruce went up to the lab later that day, to the clutter he had left the night before. His eyes itched with tiredness. Technically he could have returned to bed. There was no schedule he had to adhere to, no time he had to be here or there. But he smelt the dark, heady smell of a particularly strong brew, and felt Tony's hand on the small of his back, and turned around, hesitantly taking the mug.

"You're not going to tell me to go get some sleep?" asked Bruce.

"Why would I do that? You have things to do. Don't be ridiculous." Tony quietly reached over and dipped his finger into the liquid in a test tube, examining the residue left on his finger as if it was the most fascinating thing in the world. "If you need to be dosed up with some more awful, awful chemicals, shout me. Probably best not to down this stuff. Tempting though it is."

Bruce liked the way he softened the edges of his words by accompanying them with a smile that was wide and honest. He downed half of the mug of coffee, and all of the dissonance between how he had acted before fell away, lacking any foundation. A situation, no matter how changed or vulnerable it made you seem, no matter how much you sometimes wanted to silently raise a mask or make a wall with excuses, was okay if it procured you coffee. The past was a cold place.


End file.
